Will Fried Chicken Spots Replace Bars in the UK?

Photo by Cory Doctorow of all people. via Flickr

by Charles Irwell

First things first, I am a teetotaller. Put simply, boozing wasn’t for me anymore and I stopped. No grand narrative, no ‘touching bottom’ or any of the other clichés. We are a growing minority, but it is not hard to see why we are still very much a minority. Drinking is not merely another thing to do in the UK, but is fabric-of-the-nation stuff. Our socializing is so intrinsically linked with alcohol that the person who quits drinking finds themself stuck between two worlds – wanting to be social without being perceived as a pedantic buzzkill, or going out and getting bored to tears by bevved-up rambling at closing time. One of the most unpleasant feelings in the world is being the only sober person in a room full of drunks, but it is as much a feeling of missing out as it is of general disgust. The humble chicken shop solves all these problems – a place to sit, talk, scran down, hear conversation, feel all the hive camaraderie that our cities are, and even meet new friends. Allow me to give an example.

Burnage, Manchester, England. Friday Night.

A crowd queues around the corner of Lane End Road, a street so ordinary it is laughable. The crowd is thick and deep, sometimes spilling into the road. In a suburb which produced Oasis, one would think the next big thing in British Music is emerging. But you’d be wrong.

Rather, the people are queuing for Miami Crispy Fried Chicken. The name may seem trite. KFC’s recent advertising campaign took aim at the format of naming a chicken shop after a random US state or city. Its decoration is sparse and amateur. The sign is orange, with a washed-out, smiling cartoon chicken on it, as if they lost interest when putting it up. Unlike many other eateries in the area, the till is cash only. Despite this, the enthusiasm for its humble fried chicken – the ultimate bang-for-buck in fast food – appears insatiable.

Photo of Miami Crispy Fried Chicken via Google Maps

I wouldn’t be the first hack to point this out. Among scribblers and creators, it is a growing niche. Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date is a runaway success and speaks to the contemporary city dweller. It is also baffling in the extreme to anyone outside the context of British cities. In a recent interview, Andrew Schulz confronted KSI and asked why there was a show where “a white girl buys black guys fried chicken.” The fact that an American fails to see the wider context of fried chicken in Britain – along with Dimoldenberg’s trademark cringey interview method – is a sure sign that it is a cultural bloom all its own. Their ubiquity has also fuelled another explosion of creativity, namely the criticism and rating of the best shops. The Chicken Connoisseur’s YouTube show The Pengest Munch is still going strong, and has the power to make or break new businesses. Furthermore, as his ironic wearing of a school uniform insinuates, this is a domain dominated by youth. In his iconic play Blood Brothers, Willy Russell writes:

Your friends are with you to talk away the night
Or until Mrs Wong switches off the chippy light

The punk ethics and outlook of the chicken shop speak to a whole generation that socializes over the chicken box and plastic table, just as yesterday’s paper spoke to generations past. 

As chicken shops rise, another social staple of British life has been in slow decline. In 2022, an estimated 400 pubs closed nationwide, at a mean rate of 32 a month. Staffing pressures, exorbitant tax, soaring running costs and dwindling customers are killing them. This is not to say that the national talent for alcohol consumption is in decline. According to DrinkAware, a third of all surveyed males admitted to drinking over 14 units a week, as did a quarter of females. Yet, as the pub takes a backseat in our social lives, the chicken shop goes from strength to strength. According to the Financial Times, only three postcodes in the UK do not have a chicken shop, and these are in the Outer Hebrides. 

Little wonder, from a business perspective. Fried chicken, unlike curry or kebabs, can be batch made without a loss in quality, and require little culinary skill. KFC’s oft-touted ‘secret herbs and spices’ are negligible in cost, and high quality chicken is easy to find and cheap. All this considered, the profit margin on a bag of chicken rests at somewhere between 70-80 per cent. Fries, drinks and the rest barely count as expenses, and one will never lack hungry customers. Mile End Road in east London has fourteen shops on it, and all make a healthy profit. Factor in other selling points – open to all ages, and often with business hours as heroic as pubs and bars – and we appear to have found the pub’s successor.

Yet, one cannot make love to the world, and there is the usual brigade of prohibitionists bemoaning the meteoric success of fried chicken. One glorious whinge by the Guardian’s Sarah Boseley is entitled “The Chicken Shop Mile and How Britain Got Fat.” I don’t think it is any coincidence that a middle class woman looks at Tower Hamlets’ chicken shops and immediately blames them for all flabby children. These neighbourhoods are full of foreign-looking people – there are so many of them! They are all eating chips! The humanity! These polluters of society, with their strange diets and culture! They must be stopped!

All this, as if chip shops, kebab shops, pub grub, curry houses, Chinese takeouts, ready meals and a whole other rogues’ gallery hasn’t done this job for far longer. It is risible that the most vocal opponents to the existence of fat people come from neighbourhoods where one can afford to eat organic, non-GMO and gluten-free food without murdering your bank balance, and have a work-life balance that can afford midday runs and cycle trips. 

Photo also by Cory Doctorow. via Flickr.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan, in one of his infrequent flutterings of activity, proposed such absurd measures as introducing licensing laws for food, as well as draconian zoning proposals banning chicken shops from being within 500m of a school. That’s right, Mr. Mayor, get rid of the vital safe spaces and put people out on the street again, where anything can happen! This is not counting police harassment, as communal areas where people eat food get blamed for an increase in knife crime. 

Like the pint before them, the “piece of chicken in batter with fries and a can of full-sugar drink for £1.99” (which Boseley describes with all the warmth and emotion of a Martian invader) is a simple pleasure, and simple pleasures are in short supply. Such nannying is easily countered with the two simple adages of Everything in Moderation and, if it comes to it, My Waistline, My Problem. The issue of blaming chicken shops for social ills makes as much sense as blaming a paper company for people doodling penises.

As much as I have extolled the virtues of the chicken shop, it is not merely a surrogate or replacement for social spaces, but an enhancer and one in its own right. Why is it that a flaneur must feel shackled to the library, the gallery, the coffee house or the other chambers of the cosy? Why not the humble booth or the plastic table? As a writer, I can think of no richer seam than the take-out, and see such a wide spectrum of humankind. Families, young, old, migrant, local, rich, poor, the melange of languages, patois, slang and accent – the opportunities are endless, and the chicken shop need not merely be a kooky framing device or punchline. An order of wings can be to the modern creative what the glass of Absinthe was to La Belle Epoque. It is also a truer depiction of modern life than anything one could possibly see from a Costa Coffee. One cannot look at a throng of people as massive as the one outside Miami Crispy Fried Chicken, and not wonder if a future conversation will take place explaining how mum met dad over a three-piece meal with a Mango Rubicon.